AI is moving fast, picking new winners and losers.
The pace of AI development has been remarkable, often surpassing the speed at which the internet evolved. While the internet took several years to reach significant milestones, such as reaching 100 million users, AI technologies have achieved similar feats in much shorter timeframes. For example, large language models like ChatGPT have gained widespread attention and usage in just a matter of months. This rapid progress can be attributed to advancements in computing power, increased availability of data, and the continuous refinement of AI algorithms.
The current impacts of AI on sales and marketing (right now)
AI has made significant advancements in the sales industry, offering valuable tools and capabilities that enhance sales team performance and drive better outcomes. Through AI algorithms and predictive analytics, organizations can make more accurate sales forecasts and informed decisions for future planning. AI-based lead scoring systems provide insights into lead quality and conversion potential, enabling sales teams to prioritize their efforts and focus on the most promising opportunities.
The sooner marketing and sales teams have access to AI-informed tools, the faster they'll be able to keep pace with the change.
AI's ability to summarize calls and email threads streamlines information extraction, saving time and improving productivity. Additionally, AI automates repetitive tasks like data entry and administrative work, allowing salespeople to dedicate more time to building relationships and closing deals. Overall, AI is bringing greater efficiency and effectiveness to sales processes, empowering teams to achieve success in customer engagements.
>See how AI is impacting the quality of leads in our Warm Leads Lab
An example of what AI-equipped resources can do today.
As a HubSpot solutions partner, we can share just how fast this has developed within the software that we use and help others put it to work. HubSpot marketing already provides AI support across these areas of marketing:
- Enhance your blog posts with Generative AI, making them more engaging and informative than ever before.
- Take your marketing email copy up a notch by leveraging Generative AI to create compelling and personalized content that resonates with your audience.
- Craft effective landing page copy that earns attention and creates conversions with the assistance of Generative AI, ensuring your message is impactful and persuasive.
- Generate eye-catching images for your blog or website using AI, allowing you to create visually stunning content that grabs your readers' attention.
- Utilize the intelligence of Generative AI to conduct thorough keyword research, helping you identify the most relevant and high-performing keywords for your content, resulting in better visibility and reach.
Here’s where the marketing roadmap will take you in the coming days with HubSpot:
- Craft engaging and share-worthy social media posts that resonate with your audience, driving engagement and building a strong online presence.
- Develop compelling and persuasive ad copy that entices your target audience, maximizing click-through rates and conversions.
- Take charge of your marketing campaign from start to finish, using your creative prowess and the assistance of Generative AI to develop a comprehensive strategy, create captivating content, and execute a successful campaign.
- Create diverse and engaging content across various platforms, ensuring you have a continuous stream of fresh and captivating material to share with your audience.
Being locked in DIY or legacy software, salespeople today often spend 40% or more of their time doing work that is mostly administrative. As technology continues to advance, SMBs of all sizes will be able to level up and shift this precious time away from administrative work to building relationships with good customers. But first, they need to get free of software that isn’t up to the task.
Software consolidation and streamlining in 2023 have to take into account these new capabilities if SMBs want to bridge the gap between their small teams and what big Corporations can do.
For sales, HubSpot already delivers a rich array of AI support:
- Craft compelling and persuasive sales emails that grab the attention of your prospects and drive them toward taking action.
- Utilize the power of transcription and call coaching with the help of AI to accurately transcribe calls, identify coaching opportunities, and enhance the performance of your sales team.
- Leverage AI's capabilities to automatically score leads based on predetermined criteria, enabling your sales team to prioritize and focus on the most promising opportunities.
- Enhance your contact database and enrich company data by leveraging AI's data analysis and integration capabilities, ensuring you have up-to-date and comprehensive information about your leads and prospects.
In the not-too-distant future, you’ll see HubSpot sales tools that take this even further:
- Utilize AI-powered algorithms to forecast sales, providing valuable insights into future revenue and helping you make informed business decisions.
- Employ AI-driven tools to prioritize deals based on various factors such as lead quality, potential revenue, and customer engagement, ensuring your team focuses on the most valuable opportunities.
- Enhance lead scoring with the advanced capabilities of AI, allowing for a more accurate assessment of lead quality and the likelihood of conversion, enabling your sales team to prioritize their efforts effectively.
- Leverage AI's summarization capabilities to extract key information from calls and email threads, saving time and providing concise summaries that highlight crucial details.
- Harness the power of AI to extract action items and tasks from calls and emails, creating a streamlined workflow for your team and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
- Predict churn and what is driving that churn.
The lack of AI-informed Marketing and Sales is the new digital divide
In the modern landscape, the absence of AI can be seen as a new version of the digital divide that separates companies. Just as the traditional digital divide refers to the gap between those with access to technology and those without, the lack of AI adoption creates a similar divide between companies that leverage its capabilities and those that do not. Companies without AI face numerous challenges in terms of efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness.
Imagine the sales team that continues to do everything using software that is not integrated and continues to be bound to spreadsheets and administrative tasks - it doesn't bode well.
They may struggle to analyze and make sense of vast amounts of data, limiting their ability to gain valuable insights and make informed decisions. Getting reporting data is a real challenge today for sales and marketing teams. But without AI-driven automation, these companies will continue to be burdened by time-consuming manual processes, hindering their agility and hindering their ability to respond swiftly to market demands.
Furthermore, the absence of AI-powered personalization and customer engagement tools puts them at a disadvantage when delivering the tailored experiences and strong connections that their audience wants and needs.
Is there a silver lining to the kind of rapid change we're seeing and the concerns about what AI will do instead of people? Perhaps it is in the opportunity for sales and marketing teams to focus more deeply on building strong connections with customers instead of hopping from one software to the next doing manual data entry and administrative tasks. As experts, they are most valuable when they are connected to, and talking with people.
